Good Friday in Havana
Good Friday in Havana
By Aurelio Pedroso
April 7/2012
The papal petition has been heard. The capital city woke up this Friday with the air of a Sunday when the daily hustle and bustle of its more than two million inhabitants is toned down significantly. Streets are emptier and even city buses run as long ago, with enough room so that all can find a place to sit, or at least passengers are not submitted to a cruel process of an involuntary “sardinization” and heat
It is the saddest day for Catholics –and Christians in general– because of the death of Jesus. Few know that here. Neither do they know that it is a day of penance and pain, an action less well known. There is something of which all are fully aware: it is a holiday, there is no work and many will watch Cardinal Jaime Ortega’s oratory in a Cuban TV channel for commemorating the event. And when bells are ringing at three o’clock in all major churches and in the farthest and most humble ones, someone will explain: this is the hour that Jesus died on the cross.
Little by little Cuba could be heading back on a Catholic road, and in many cases hand in hand with those Afro Cuban rites that common people call “witchcraft”. The joke or comment of the moment come from those old enough to have experienced Holy Week in all its splendor, Only fish should be eaten on this day, the neighbor tells you –or a friend you find at the corner or someone who telephones to find out if you already have a red snapper in the oven.
A visiting Spanish friend told me that she asked the manager at a government run restaurant why there was not enough fish on a day like the present one. He, with the greatest of certainties, answered her that our coastal waters were devoid of fish.
I only managed to ask her if this gentleman’s rapidly growing nose did not poke her in the eye. Some nerve!
There is fish very often at government run fisheries, and at fishing villages near Havana you can buy a bag of ten frozen fish fillets for less than $10 dollars.
Indeed, most Cuban have always lived with their backs to the sea. Only in the culinary sense, of course, for otherwise passion for the sea could border on addiction.
Some historians claim that the reason runs way back to the arrival of the first immigrants, Spaniards, by the way, who came from intricate places of Spain’s geography where the sea was a tale of fantasy. Sea products were not among their food priorities; rather those heavy soups to fight the cold that today are omnipresent on most Cuban tables even in the hottest of summer months. It seems that through generations the idea that fish was only fit for Holy Week took hold. At my home, five miles away from the Port and fishing town of Caibarién, with two cloistered nuns in the family tree, a grandfather from the Asturias woodland and a few spinsters close to the parish priest, grouper or red snapper were only Good Friday dishes.
This Friday many of the faithful followed the processions of the Way of the Cross, and as usual there were many curious neighboring bystanders.
Good Friday is again part of the nation’s history, with its subtleties and peculiarities, but Goof Friday after all –with or without fish, in the minds of our present children.
Progreso Semanal/Weekly authorizes the reproduction of all or part of the articles by our journalists as long as the source and author are identified.
